Roses For Motivation

Roses.  I love them.  When we moved into this house last year, I inherited five mature rose bushes and have been delighted with their abundance.  I can view red climber blooms just outside my study window.  Yellow roses, my favorites, are in profusion just across the yard.  I have one other climber that needs a bit of coaxing, a dark red near my front door that wants to be a climber but really isn't, and next to it, the palest of pink blossoms on my smallest plant.

I suffer thorn pricks, the hot sun, and never-ending battles with insects and disease to cultivate these gems of the garden.  I fully understand why a lot of people don't grow roses because of the constant care they require, but I rationalize that the rewards are worth the work.  Filling our home with vases of fragrant flowers makes every hour of gardening worth the time.

My mother taught me a lot about raising roses, and even as a small child, I remember helping my grandmother cut blooms for bouquets from her large rose garden.  In every home I've owned, rose bushes have always graced my yard, and I have plans in the works to expand my current beds.

Besides the beauty, myriad of color and fragrance produced by it, the very essence of how a rose plant can prosper for years and years in spite of all that can threaten it inspires me somehow.  And, when I'm pruning, feeding, harvesting and protecting all my bushes, that process inspires my writing discipline.  Because whether I'm puzzling over why my one bush, in the same soil next to a prospering cousin, just grows leaves and not many blooms, or delighting in the best reward of my efforts as I walk room to room and view the many bouquets, I equate what focus is required to get to the worthwhile satisfaction.

It was wisely said that nothing worth doing is easy.  Having those roses in constant sight, as I toil at my computer, never fails to prompt me to keep at it.